Arquivos de Tag para Blue Marble

Amanda Gorman read the poem – Our Purpose in Poetry: Or, Earhrise – from stage at the Los Angeles Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training on Tuesday, August 28, 2018. Amanda is a Youth Poet Laureate of the United States of America and her performance was outstanding and the poem is real piece of art and heart.

Those three guys
Were surprised
To see from their eyes
Our planet looked like an earthrise
A blue orb hovering over the moon’s gray horizon,
with deep oceans and silver skies.

It was our world’s first glance at itself
Our first chance to see a shared reality,
A declared stance and a commonality;

A glimpse into our planet’s mirror,
And as threats drew nearer,
Our own urgency became clearer,
As we realize that we hold nothing dearer
than this floating body we all call home.

We’ve known
That we’re caught in the throes
Of climactic changes some say
Will just go away,
While some simply pray
To survive another day;
For it is the obscure, the oppressed, the poor,
Who when the disaster
Is declared done,
Still suffer more than anyone.

Climate change is the single greatest challenge of our time,

Of this, you’re certainly aware.
It’s saddening, but I cannot spare you
From knowing an inconvenient fact, because
It’s getting the facts straight that gets us to act and not to wait.

So I tell you this not to scare you,
But to prepare you, to dare you
To dream a different reality,

Where despite disparities
We all care to protect this world,
This riddled blue marble, this little true marvel
To muster the verve and the nerve
To see how we can serve
Our planet. You don’t need to be a politician
To make it your mission to conserve, to protect,
To preserve that one and only home
That is ours,
To use your unique power
To give next generations the planet they deserve.

We are demonstrating, creating, advocating
We heed this inconvenient truth, because we need to be anything but lenient
With the future of our youth.

And while this is a training,
in sustaining the future of our planet,
There is no rehearsal. The time is
Now
Now
Now,
Because the reversal of harm,
And protection of a future so universal
Should be anything but controversial.

So, earth, pale blue dot
We will fail you not.

Just as we chose to go to the moon
We know it’s never too soon
To choose hope.
We choose to do more than cope
With climate change
We choose to end it—
We refuse to lose.
Together we do this and more
Not because it’s very easy or nice
But because it is necessary,
Because with every dawn we carry
the weight of the fate of this celestial body orbiting a star.
And as heavy as that weight sounded, it doesn’t hold us down,
But it keeps us grounded, steady, ready,
Because an environmental movement of this size
Is simply another form of an earthrise.

To see it, close your eyes.
Visualize that all of us leaders in this room
and outside of these walls or in the halls, all
of us changemakers are in a spacecraft,
Floating like a silver raft
in space, and we see the face of our planet anew.
We relish the view;
We witness its round green and brilliant blue,
Which inspires us to ask deeply, wholly:
What can we do?
Open your eyes.
Know that the future of
this wise planet
Lies right in sight:
Right in all of us. Trust
this earth uprising.
All of us bring light to exciting solutions never tried before
For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core,
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for.

I have been thinking about writing this post since I left the movie theater accompanied by my friend Marie Johnson on Aug 4th. I postponed doing it so many times. Not today!

The new Al Gore movie, the unofficial name of the documentary – The Inconvenient Sequel: truth to power – is worth talking about and watching again. At this point, everyone has a comment, or an opinion, and your own point of view about the movie in favor of or against joining the art critics’ club or the ranking pages.

If it is about money, Forbes’ contributor Scott Mendelson said that in 24 days the documentary earned a total of $2.95 million at the box office. If it’s a lot or not, depends on which reference you’re using. He used the blockbuster hit – Wonder Woman – as a reference. Wrong choice, I think. It is not sound to confront documentaries vis a vis blockbusters and then say that the former “plunged” according to Mr. Mendelson, because the latter earned worldwide $800 million.

I’m done with numbers. They can be the centerpiece of another post. In this one, I want to express my personal sense about a documentary with so many layers – climate advocacy and activism, climate negotiation, climate innovation and technology, climate agreements, climate risks and disasters, climate ethics and justice, and so on. One can read just one of the layers and, still, will have a sense of the documentary as a whole. Good work on the script and production, I must say!

Blue Marble – I am choosing to talk about one of the layers, which is for me, the thread conducting the lyrical narrative of Al Gore movie. This lyrical narrative is an appealing emotional message urging humans to gain a sense of belonging to Planet Earth as Our Home. In doing so it could arise a sentiment of protection and care that will lead to actions towards fighting climate change and implementing a transition into a low or net carbon society and a sustainable future.

How the narrator – Al Gore, himself in the documentary – introduces the lyrical narrative. What was the element to hook the viewer? I would never have expected it to be the “Blue Marble” – a unique image of the Earth far out in the cosmos, taken by Apollo 17, in 1972, and the story about the picture in Al Gore’s office.

From time to time during the documentary, the narrator Al Gore brings back the story of that frame and his relationship with that image. The impressions of the picture on Al Gore and what it meant to him led to DSCOVR – Deep Space Climate Observatory – launched by NASA in 2015, and, today, a NOAA space weather satellite known as well as GoreSat. Today, many pictures of the whole planet Earth are available, including one showing the shadow of the Moon cast on Earth, and lots of data about weather conditions and climate.

Before Blue Marble, the view that immersed me in the universe was the one I saw on my family tv screen when I was about to enter my teens. Prior to landing on the Moon, Apollo 11 sent images of Earth as half globe picture – how beautiful that was!

Earth from space – I was experiencing, at that time, the Overview Effect, and I guess Al Gore was touched by that too. The Overview Effect was described by Frank White in 1987 in his book The Overview Effect — Space Exploration and Human Evolution.

According to White, the Overview Effect is an experience that carries in itself the potential to affect perceptions of the world and humanity after viewing the Earth from space and from the Moon. A spin-off of the book is the short film Overview released in December 2012 by the Overview Institute.

In that film, astronauts and cosmonauts explain their perceptions and attitudes towards the planet and a sustainable future. If you want to watch the 17-minute film on how the phenomenon changes perception, click on the link below.

… when we look down on the Earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet … It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also at the same time looks extremely fragile …

… come up with a new story, a new picture, a new way to approach this and to shift our behaviors in a such a way that leads to a sustainable approach to our civilization as oppose to a destructive approach …